On Mon, 25 Nov 2002 06:16:11 -1100 Michael Pugliese <debsian at pacbell.net>
writes:
> >...Nestor Gorojovsky
>
> He's interviewed the creep too!
> Michael Pugliese
>
> FREE PRESIDENT MILOSEVIC NOW! HANDS OFF YUGOSLAVIA!
> ... Néstor Miguel Gorojovsky, Argentina; Professor Rui Namorado Rosa
> ... weekly, 'Left Russia,'
> http://www/left.ru; ... International's stand on extraditing Mr.
> Milosevic.); ...
> http://emperors-clothes.com/petition/petition.htm
>
>
>
Milo may well be guilty of many crimes but he is hardly alone in that regards. His biggest crime, perhaps, was the fact of his losing the Balkan wars, and for that he must pay. Needless to say, fellow war criminals like former President Bill Clinton are not to going to be sitting at the dock with him in The Hague anytime soon.
Jim F. ***********************************************************************
If Churchill isn't a war criminal then who is?
Ian Bell The Sunday Herald, 24 November 2002
I DON'T recall who first made the joke, but it never fails to get a laugh. 'Satire died,' the old quip goes, 'when they gave the Nobel Peace Prize to Henry Kissinger.' Lots of innocent Cambodians died, too, in the philosopher-statesman's secret and illegal bombing campaign in Indochina, but that wasn't mentioned in the citation.
Kissinger was one of the lucky ones. He got a prize, plaudits and a lucrative corporate afterlife despite losing a war. In general, you have to be on the winning side to award yourself medals and the chance to write the history books. Losers have the record written for them, as often as not in the form of an indictment.
Slobodan Milosevic must ponder that truth on a daily basis as he struggles to evade justice in the Hague. If only he had remained the West's favourite Balkan strong man, he must think, no-one would be confusing his administrative lapses with crimes against humanity. To be the last dictator left standing when the music stops is rough justice indeed. Slobodan and Saddam, once the favoured thugs in their respective regions -- 'stabilising forces', if you prefer -- should compare notes.
But then, that's the tricky thing with war crimes. Everyone who is ever involved in a conflict commits them, intentionally or not, yet the right to prosecute -- and to define the crime -- is reserved for those who come out on top. Were hundreds of Taliban prisoners just massacred in Afghanistan? Is a case pending? Do you ever get tired of silly questions?
The issue is relevant now, of course, because the Pentagon's capacity for precision-guided euphemism is about to be tested in a big way in the precincts of Baghdad.
The moral relativism that pollutes what remain of the rules of war -- the good guys never do bad things -- has entirely eradicated objective judgement. Slaughter or collateral damage: it all depends, apparently, on your point of view. And on your firepower.
The argument, to hear the White House and Downing Street tell it, runs like this. Saddam is a monster; Saddam is probably a dangerous monster; therefore, somehow, numerous Iraqi dead are the price 'we' must pay to see him off. It's his fault, not ours, and we're really very sorry. But nothing remotely resembling a crime could possibly be involved.
Much the same confidence could have been observed at Nuremberg in 1946. Here, as never before, were 22 cast-iron cases, men whose crimes were written in blood and the ashes of six million Jews, men who had flouted every international treaty and convention, men who had industrialised slaughter and cruelty with a clear, even proud, understanding of their actions. The Nazis arraigned -- Goering, Hess, Streicher and the rest -- were lucky not to have been shot out of hand.
Nevertheless, there was a question never properly addressed in the 403 open sessions of the Nuremberg tribunal: who had given the Allies the right to stage these trials? What authority did they possess? The answer was that Britain, America, France and the Soviet Union, with the agreement of 20 other states, had granted the right to themselves. They had devised a charter, defined the unprecedented charges, and given themselves the permission to prosecute.
So what? The evidence of crimes against humanity was stark. The willingness of the victors to adhere to due process after so much suffering was undoubtedly a step forward. You might have quibbled over the charge that the Nazis had committed crimes against peace, since it might have been applied to any state that had ever gone to battle, but genocide and war crimes surely demanded justice. After Belsen, after the rape of Europe, the world would have accepted no less. Besides, the trials were fair, by any standard, in a manner fascists would never comprehend.
That was never really the problem. The problem could be seen, first, in the person of Major General Jurisprudence IT Nikitchenko, the Soviet member of the tribunal, he who objected strenuously to the acquittals of three Nazi small-fry. This was the representative, after all, of Joseph Stalin, that genocidal mass murderer who outdid Hitler both in the numbers he slaughtered and in the fact that he died, peacefully, in his own bed.
No-one ever dared to try Stalin for his undoubted crimes against humanity; no-one ever thought of making the attempt. His troops may have engaged in mass rape and wholesale executions in the final battle for Berlin; hundreds of thousands of German prisoners might have died in his camps; millions of his own people might have been put to death.
But Stalin was a winner; he helped to create the Nuremberg charter and it most assuredly did not apply to him.
Still, we know all about the Soviet nightmare, don't we? The crimes of our temporary ally were none of our doing. But who handed thousands of Don Cossacks over to the beast for certain execution at the war's end? Whose scientists worked feverishly on the Manhattan project in order to immolate the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? And who ordered the terror bombing of German cities, a campaign that found its memorial in the firestorms of Dresden, a town known throughout the war to be of no military significance whatever?
Much to the indignation and disgust of the Daily Telegraph, a German -- of all people -- has just had the temerity to ask the last of these questions. While Britain indulges in the harmless, BBC-sponsored game of deciding who was the very greatest Brit of them all, Jorg Friedrich, citizen of a country that has spent half a century contemplating the enormity that is its Nazi past, has mentioned Winston Churchill and war crimes.
So the atrocity auction begins. Former RAF air crew members write to the Telegraph demanding remembrance for the 55,000 of their own who never returned from the raids on Germany and insist that terror was never their business.
Commentators remind us that Churchill saved this country from those who conceived and executed the Holocaust. The balance sheet of moral loss and gain between freedom and totalitarianism is produced again. But the German historian repeats his simple point: a war crime is a war crime is a war crime.
He adds, for good measure, a simple question: 'Do you want to live in a nation which does not know its own past?' That hits the mark. Germany has not been spared knowledge of its vast crimes. Its past cannot be banished, certainly not idealised.
But in Britain, where the official version of history is a totem and heroes, Churchill above all, are beyond reproach, many certainties are at stake if you even suggest that evil was once done in a good cause. The biggest certainty of all is that such things, if they happened, could never happen again.
This is odd, for several reasons. Friedrich's book, Der Brand (The Fire: Germany Under Bombard-ment 1940-45), might be causing great debate in the historian's own country, but its thesis is scarcely new.
The horrific effect of the bombings of Dresden, Hamburg and other cities has long been a matter of record. Their strategic purpose -- and the sacrifice of all those air crew -- has long been questioned. And Churchill, in the midst of war, did not attempt to conceal his intentions. After the levelling of Coventry, after Clydebank and the Blitz, he said explicitly that Germany would be repaid many times over, and exulted in the subsequent 'victories.'
Do we blame him for that? Probably not. But there is no question that the bombing campaign breached the Hague and Geneva convention provisions designed to protect civilians and that it was, win or lose, a war crime.
To argue otherwise is to demand the sort of double-standard that gained Kissinger his Nobel prize, that justified the 88,000 dead at Hiroshima, that underwrites the modern Pentagon's high-level saturation bombing tactics.
Hitler offered the challenge of total war, war against entire populations, but in accepting the challenge Churchill invited judgement by the same standards.
His resemblance to Hitler ends with that. There is no shred of justification for suggesting any sort of moral equivalence. But there is equally no excuse for the sort of ignorant, BBC-sponsored hero-worship that makes a mockery of history and truth.
Churchill was as brutally ruthless, more than once, as he believed the situation demanded. If we really are to put any faith in international law, now and in the future, we should say so.
Bear it in mind, please, the next time someone decides to celebrate the natural superiority of the British. Bear it in mind, above all, when our stainless democrats present the bill for Baghdad.
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